Premature babies who once would have died leave the hospital alive these days.
Now, medical science wants to help these babies go on with the rest of their lives. Each year, more than 7 percent of all infants are born far before their due date. Babies who should still be inside a womb find themselves thrust under bright lights and tethered to machines.
The neonatal intensive care unit, lifesaving as it is in the short term, could cause problems in the long term, research suggests.
Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas has started construction on a new unit designed to help save the very sick infant while keeping in mind the future child. The whole intensive care unit isn’t undergoing renovation, only the cove reserved for babies who will spend two months or more in the hospital. Of Parkland’s 14,000 annual births, about 200 need this kind of long-term stay.
This ward — paid for with a $400,000 gift from Crystal Charity Ball and $100,000 from the Parkland Foundation — will not resemble the standard beige-walled, fluorescent-lighted intensive care unit. Instead, it will be brightly colored to help exercise underdeveloped eyes. A recliner beside each bed will allow mothers to cuddle their babies next to the skin.
“We’re now trying to look at the whole baby,” said Dr. Jeffrey Perlman, medical director of Parkland’s neonatal intensive care unit. The unit will also have glass doors to muffle the noise of equipment and people. Indirect lighting will automatically brighten and dim like the sun, instead of turning on and off with a switch. The most constant sound will come from speakers that softly bathe the tiny patients in music.
Each change has a deliberate purpose. While Perlman and his colleagues can now save infants who once would have certainly died, he said, “they survive at a cost.” Studies have found that babies born prematurely often have an increased risk of vision, hearing and learning difficulties, among other problems.
Vision is the last sense to develop in infants, so a premature infant’s eyes are extremely delicate and vulnerable to damage, Perlman said. In addition, a baby’s underdeveloped sense of sight gets little training in a normal intensive care unit. The new unit will have a television screen with changing shapes and colors. The walls will be painted in purples, reds, greens and other vivid hues. The color scheme might not make Architectural Digest, but when the babies open their eyes, they won’t see a bland room.
Mostly, the unit will enable the kinds of studies that can help settle many debates among health professionals: Do premature babies fare better in mostly dim light, or when lights fade with patterns of sunrise and sunset? How often and how early should infants receive skin-to-skin contact? Can Mozart help the mind make up for an early birth?
“We want to study, in particular, the effects of music,” Perlman said.
During the 1990s, in the field of child development, music took on a life of its own. In 1993, a brief study in the journal Nature reported that listening to a Mozart sonata increased college students’ ability to perform certain mental tasks.
The music’s effect lasted 10 to 15 minutes. But the hype hasn’t ended. Popular media began publicizing what became known as the “Mozart effect,” and suddenly parents began buying compact discs in the hopes that works by the great composer would touch their child’s tender mind.
“I think it’s great to play music for kids, but there are no studies to support the idea that music makes them smarter,” said child-development researcher Frances Rauscher of the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh, who conducted the 1993 Mozart research. “In terms of whether it’s going to cause them to score higher on the SATs, I’m doubtful.”
While emphasizing that Mozart won’t turn babies into geniuses, Rauscher and others do believe that the brain’s response to music should be studied.
“There is research showing there’s something going on there that we want to investigate further,” said John Flohr of Texas Woman’s University, who conducts studies on music and the brain. “What is music really about? It’s affecting our emotion, it’s affecting our mood and the way we feel, and that in turn is affecting the way we think.”
Music studies have involved older children and adolescents, and even rodents, but very few researchers have examined the question in newborns. One 1998 study, from Florida State University in Tallahassee, involved 40 premature babies, half of whom received a regimen of sensory stimulation once or twice a week. The core of the treatment was a soft humming of Brahms’ Lullaby.
